Art
Step into the imaginative realms of fashion trailblazers Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo at NGV International, or lose yourself in the playful, joy-saturated world of Paola Pivi’s most ambitious exhibition yet at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In Canberra, the Indigenous Art Triennial amplifies powerful cultural voices, while Brisbane’s GOMA invites you to wander through Olafur Eliasson’s immersive, multi-sensory universe. And in Sydney, Ron Mueck’s monumental sculptures stand as awe-inspiring, larger-than-life reflections on what it means to be human.
Dive in, these are the must-see art experiences of the season.
This major international exhibition pairs the work of two of the most visionary and influential fashion designers in recent history, Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022) and Rei Kawakubo (1942–) of Comme des Garçons.
Emerging in the 1970s, both rebelled against rigid social expectations to find artistic and economic freedom through fashion. Self-taught iconoclasts who challenged the ‘rules’ of dress, their work is grounded in the desire for change. Throughout their careers, Westwood and Kawakubo have reframed ideas of beauty, gender and the relationship between body and garment through their rejection of fashion norms. By experimenting with cut, form and function, each designer has reimagined the traditions of tailoring and dressmaking. Today, their material, technical and conceptual innovations continue to disrupt the status quo and shape the way we dress.
Bringing together over 140 works from the NGV Collection with selected important loans from international museums.
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Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson invites us on an expansive, multi-sensory journey that engages our sense of perception. Choose your path through a primordial landscape, encounter moments that heighten awareness and envision the future form of the city.
This Brisbane-exclusive exhibition draws from the three‑decade career of one of the world’s most influential living artists. Spanning GOMA’s ground floor galleries, it includes important early works and expansive site-specific installations, many developed especially for ‘Presence’.
From the early work Beauty 1993, which suspends a rainbow in a veil of mist, to Pluriverse assembly 2021, a spatial installation that unfurls ever-changing reflections of light, Eliasson’s creations come to life as they meet the viewer’s senses and body.
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Ron Mueck: Encounter brings an unparalleled selection of the acclaimed Australian artist’s sculptures exclusively to Sydney.
Since revitalising figurative sculpture in the late 1990s with his exquisitely crafted realism, Melbourne-born Mueck continues his profound observation of human experience and emotion. His captivating figures, scaled from the monumental to the minute, embody themes such as birth and death, alienation and togetherness, tenderly inviting us to explore our relationship with the world.
At the centre of the exhibition is Havoc, a new immersive work featuring a group of larger-than-life fighting dogs, created especially for this moment. Oversized, yet charged with a quiet, unsettling intensity, Havoc invites viewers into a space that is at once intimate and ominous.
This exhibition encourages audiences to connect with Mueck’s sculptures through encounters that feel viscerally physical. Drawing the artist’s past sculptures into dialogue with the new, the show reflects on the sensitivity and significance of Mueck’s work within our tense contemporary times.
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Paola Pivi – I don’t like it, I love it by globally celebrated artist Paola Pivi is an expansive and vibrant exhibition marking one of the artist’s biggest and most ambitious projects in her almost 30-year career. The installation at AGWA features major commissions created especially for AGWA’s unique architectural spaces, as well as other new works and key selected works from across Pivi’s career.
Italian-born Paola Pivi (b.1971) is one of the world’s most recognisable and loved contemporary artists. Her practice playfully blurs the line between reality and fantasy, often incorporating animals and objects in surreal scenarios—multicoloured feathered polar bears in dynamic poses, zebras in arctic landscapes, or airplanes impossibly tipping and spinning in public plazas. Her works are joyful, disarming, and immediately accessible, yet also deeply thoughtful as they explore themes ranging from consumerism, sustainability, displacement, to the human condition.
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The 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial: After the Rain features 10 large-scale, immersive and multidisciplinary installations that celebrate intergenerational legacies and cultural warriors of the past, present and future.
The National Indigenous Art Triennial brings together commissioned work by established and emerging First Nations artists from across Australia, creating an important platform for art and ideas. Each iteration of the Triennial is led by a First Nations curator with an original vision. Artistic Director for the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial is Tony Albert, Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku-Yalanji peoples, one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists.
Albert weaves together projects by Alair Pambegan, Aretha Brown, Blaklash, Dylan Mooney, Hermannsburg Potters, Iltja Ntjarra Art Centre and Vincent Namatjira, Jimmy John Thaiday, Naminapu Maymuru-White, Thea Anamara Perkins, Yarrenyty Arltere Artists and Grace Kemarre Robinya, and Warraba Weatherall to tell stories through the universal language of visual art. These projects resonate with ideas about rebirth and cycles of cleansing.
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